Archives for November, 2008

No, it is not newspapers and videos that are disrupting your endocrine system (well, not that we know); rather, the topic is in the media. Endocrine disruptors are chemicals that mimic the effects of hormones. Perhaps the best-known example is bisphenol-A. Others include various pharmaceuticals, dioxin and dioxin-like compounds, polychlorinated biphenyls, DDT and other pesticides.…

This is from an interesting open-access article in Annals of General Psychiatry. It describes two studies, relating to two different catastrophic events. The authors examine the differences in how various risk factors may contribute to the development of PTSD in persons of each gender. Risk factors predict post-traumatic stress disorder differently in men and women…

There was a time when I was vacationing, near the Bosque del Apache wildlife preserve. There were literally thousands of birds. Most were snow geese or sandhill cranes. There were a lot of people, too. But off a ways, there was a trail. It went, among other places, to a spot called Solitude Canyon. Sounded…

This looks like a pile of wooden cubes with odd images on them. Assemble them correctly, and you get a 3-D image of the brain…except you can’t see it when you are done… …because the image is entirely inside. The real puzzle is this: Where do you get one? I found it on…

The Cassini orbiter shows us what is happening in the final frontier: This is an aurora on Saturn. It’s false-color, obviously. The technique is explained on the NASA site: This image of the northern polar region of Saturn shows both the aurora and underlying atmosphere, seen at two different wavelengths of infrared light as captured…

Razib already did the definitive post of voting trends in the South, looking especially at the influence of skin color. Now, we see there is a peculiar correlation: those areas that had the highest cotton production before the Civil War are the areas in which Obama did especially well. In the map below, each…

This is an illustration of Basilosaurus, a fossil whale discovered in Egypt by Phil Gingerich and colleagues. Gingerich is the guy who taught me everything I know knew about collecting fossils. I wanted on the team that went to Egypt, though. I had other priorities, like medical school. Can’t do everything. Anyway, here is an…

Various alternatives to and offshoots from Wikipedia have emerged over the years. Some readers may be familiar with Conservapedia, as an example. Now there is an entity known as Christopedia. Today the Featured Article is the one about Barack Hussein Obama. No big surprise there. What is telling, is their choice of External Links:…